Decolonization

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Decolonization began in 1775, when the American Revolution rose against the British Empire in North America. From that single revolt, a chain of independence movements would eventually free 165 colonies from Western imperial powers in the two centuries after 1783. Yet the word itself remains disputed. To some scholars, decolonization means the collapse of global colonial empires and the birth of independent states. To others, it reaches deeper, into the minds and languages of the colonized. The Martiniquan author Frantz Fanon set the terms early, in The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961. The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo later traced colonialism into thought itself, in Decolonising the Mind, published in 1986. How did empires that once seemed permanent unravel in wave after wave? Why did some settlers leave while others stayed? And why, despite all of it, do seventeen territories still sit under United Nations classification as non-self-governing? The answers run from the chaos of the Napoleonic Wars to the corridors of the United Nations.

• 2. The Waves

  ›

  The Napoleonic Wars cut the direct links between Spain and its American colonies, and the rupture opened the door to independence. The Haitian Revolution began with revolt in 1789 and a slave uprising in 1791 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, and Haiti secured independence in 1804. Brazil broke from Portugal in 1822, becoming the Empire of Brazil. The Spanish American wars of independence ran their course until Spanish forces were defeated at the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824.

  The First World War toppled the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires, and a wave of decolonization followed. After the Second World War came another, far larger wave, dismantling the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Belgian, Italian, and Japanese Empires. Many countries gained independence in the years that followed.

  The Cold War's end carried the last wave. The Soviet Union collapsed, Palau gained independence, and Hong Kong and Macau were handed over. Scholars have offered competing reasons for why anti-colonial movements spread at all. Institutional arguments point to rising education and calls for popular sovereignty. Marxist analyses point to economic shifts toward wage labor and a growing bourgeois class. A diffusion argument holds that earlier revolutionary movements simply inspired later ones. One framing contrasts the 19th century, with its strong political will and permissive international environment, against a 20th century of apathetic publics and hostile superpowers, when holding colonies came to feel like a burden.

• 3. The British Method

  ›

  Across the British Empire, independence often followed a precise bureaucratic ritual. A constitutional conference convened in London to discuss the transition to self-government. A report went to Parliament. A bill passed at Westminster to end the United Kingdom's responsibility, with the new constitution annexed. Then an Order of Council fixed the exact date of independence. The British, the source notes, were less ruthless than Belgium in controlling political dissent, and made deals with local politicians under the pressure of budgets and manpower.

  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi led a peaceful resistance to British rule in India. By becoming a symbol of both peace and opposition to imperialism, he helped many Indians come to see the British as the cause of their problems. That nationalism produced an independent India in 1947. The same year, British India was partitioned into the dominions of India and Pakistan. Hundreds of princely states were folded into the two new countries, and India and Pakistan fought several wars over Jammu and Kashmir.

  Egypt became independent in 1922, though Britain kept control of the Suez Canal and security prerogatives. The Statute of Westminster in 1931 granted full legislative independence to the dominions. In Africa, independence began with Sudan in 1956 and the Gold Coast, renamed Ghana, in 1957. Kwame Nkrumah, who lived from 1909 to 1972 and drew inspiration from the Jamaican journalist Marcus Garvey, led Ghana out of colonial rule. By 1966, all British colonies on mainland Africa were independent, though Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 was recognized by no one.

• 4. Blood And Partition

  ›

  Partition became Britain's frequent answer to division, and violence followed it closely. After the British left in 1947, large-scale communal violence broke out between Hindus and Muslims, and between Muslims and Sikhs, in the newly independent dominions. In 1970, further communal violence erupted within Pakistan in the detached eastern region of East Bengal, which became independent as Bangladesh in 1971.

  Cyprus came under full British control in 1914, taken from the Ottoman Empire, and split between a Greek majority that demanded enosis, or union with Greece, and a Turkish minority. London long believed it needed the island to defend the Suez Canal. After the Suez crisis of 1956, that reasoning faded. Cyprus became independent in 1960, but ethnic violence escalated until 1974, when Turkey invaded and partitioned the island. Each side, the source observes, rewrote its own history, blaming the other.

  Palestine became a British mandate after the First World War, at first including Transjordan. During the war Britain had made promises to both Arabs and Jews, recorded in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence and the Balfour Declaration. Decades of ethno-religious violence reached a climax with the UN Partition Plan and the war that followed. The British pulled out, and the former mandate was divided between Israel, Jordan and Egypt.

• 5. The French Reckoning

  ›

  After the First World War, colonized people felt betrayed by France's refusal to recognize their effort, especially the colonial troops known as the tirailleurs. The Great Mosque of Paris was built as a gesture of recognition, but the French state had no intention of granting self-rule. Nationalism hardened between the wars, producing Abd el-Krim's Rif War from 1921 to 1925 in Morocco and Messali Hadj's Star of North Africa in Algeria in 1925.

  On the night of the 29th of March 1947, a nationalist uprising in Madagascar met violent repression under the government of Paul Ramadier. A year of bitter fighting left between 11,000 and 40,000 Malagasy dead. In Indochina, the Viet Minh declared independence in September 1945, then attacked French troops in Hanoi in late 1946, launching the Indochina War. Cambodia and Laos became fully independent in late 1953, and Vietnam on the 4th of June 1954. The Geneva Accords of the 21st of July 1954 left Vietnam divided into North and South, and the war folded into the wider Cold War.

  The Algerian War of Independence raged from 1954 to 1962, and was officially called a public order operation until the 1990s. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur spoke of a necessary decolonization of memory, beginning with recognition of the 1961 Paris massacre. North African immigrant labor proved decisive to the post-war economic growth of the Trente Glorieuses. French employers actively recruited workers from the colonies, which the source credits for today's multiethnic population.

• 6. Empires That Hesitated

  ›

  Portugal held the longest empire of all, beginning in 1415 with the conquest of Ceuta and ending only in 1999 with the handover of Macau. From 1933 to 1974, under the authoritarian rule of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the regime was determined to keep its possessions at any cost. After India annexed Goa in 1961, revolts spread to Angola, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique. Portugal sent another 300,000 European settlers into Angola and Mozambique before 1974, when a left-wing revolution at home finally overthrew the regime and triggered a long civil war in Angola.

  Belgium's empire began with the annexation of the Congo in 1908, a response to international pressure over the atrocities of King Leopold's privately run Congo Free State. There was almost no planning for independence and exceedingly little education provided. The Belgian king suddenly announced in 1959 that independence was on the agenda, and it was hurriedly arranged in 1960 for a country bitterly divided.

  The Netherlands had built its empire over centuries, and by 1940 it was mostly the Dutch East Indies. Its oil reserves supplied about 14 percent of the Dutch national product. When Dutch soldiers returned after the war, an independent government under Sukarno was already in power, originally set up by the Empire of Japan. Washington, needing Indonesia as a Cold War ally, pressured the Dutch, who gave up their claims in 1949. Sukarno later expelled over 300,000 ethnic Dutch. Dutch economists calculated that the loss of Indonesia was compensated for by a couple of years of domestic post-war growth.

• 7. Minds And Settlers

  ›

  Frantz Fanon and Ngugi wa Thiongo opened a second front, one that treated decolonization as more than independence. The word came to describe intellectual decolonization from the colonizers' ideas that made the colonized feel inferior. The filmmaker Haile Gerima, born in Ethiopia, described the colonization of the unconscious. As a child in the mountains around Gondar he played cowboys and Indians, and he and his friends never wanted the Indians to win. In Tarzan films, when Africans crept up behind the hero, the children would scream to warn him.

  Linguistic decolonization means replacing the colonizer's language with an indigenous one as the official language. Outside Eurasia, the source notes, it largely did not happen in the newly independent states. Nation-building tried instead to forge loyalty to the new state through flags, anthems, official histories, and the replacement of colonial place-names with local ones.

  Settlers complicated everything. In much of the world, decolonization meant the expulsion or departure of colonial settlers. In states like New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States, the Canadian academics Yann Allard-Tremblay and Elaine Coburn argue, settlers never left, and colonialism continued as settler colonialism. In Algeria, the large European population, the pied noir, largely evacuated to France at independence. In Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, Robert Mugabe seized property from white farmers. In Uganda, Idi Amin expelled the Indian community for domestic political gain.

• 8. The Unfinished Map

  ›

  Seventeen territories still sit on the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories, most of them listed since 1946. The United Kingdom administers ten, among them Bermuda, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, and Pitcairn. The United States administers American Samoa, Guam, and the United States Virgin Islands. New Zealand holds Tokelau, France holds New Caledonia and French Polynesia, and Spain remains the listed power for Western Sahara. On the 10th of December 2010 the United Nations declared the Third International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism.

  The sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago is disputed between the United Kingdom and Mauritius. In February 2019, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that Britain must transfer the islands to Mauritius. In October 2020, Mauritian Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth called the British and American governments hypocrites and champions of double talk.

  The meaning of decolonization is still contested. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued that release of the colonies caused little economic loss, since the colonizer kept cheap goods and labor while shedding the burden of obligation. The political theorist Kevin Duong went further, calling decolonization perhaps the century's greatest act of disenfranchisement, because dependent territories that became nation-states lost their voice in the metropolitan assemblies whose affairs still affected them. David Strang offers a final measure of the cost to the old powers, writing that the loss of their empires turned France and Britain into second-rate powers.